Various global or local communication networks (the Internet, the World Wide Web, local area networks and the like) offer a user a vast amount of information. The information includes a multitude of contextual topics, such as but not limited to, news and current affairs, maps, company information, financial information and resources, traffic information, games and entertainment related information. Users use a variety of electronic devices (desktop, laptop, notebook, smartphone, tablets and the like) to have access to any number of web pages and rich content (like images, audio, video, animation, and other multimedia content from such networks).
Generally speaking, a given user can access a resource on the communication network by two principle means. The given user can access a particular resource directly, either by typing an address of the resource (typically an URL or Universal Resource Locator, such as www.webpage.com) or by clicking a link in an e-mail or in another web resource. Alternatively, the given user may conduct a search using a search engine to locate a resource of interest. The latter is particularly suitable in those circumstances, where the given user knows a topic of interest, but does not know the exact address of the resource she is interested in.
There are numerous search engines available to the user. Some of them are considered to be general purpose search engines (such as Yandex™, Google™, Yahoo™ and the like). Others are considered to be vertical search engines—i.e. search engines dedicated to a particular topic of search—such as Momondo™ search engine dedicated to searching flights.
Regardless which search engine is used, the search engine is generally configured to receive a search query from a user, to perform a search and to return a ranked search engine results page (SERP) to the user. Factors used within the prior art in the ranking of web pages include relevance to keywords in a search query, how recently the web page has been modified, the number of links from other web pages to the web page in question, the location of the user, among a myriad of others.